by Julian Miles | May 13, 2024 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
Nineteen hundred tomorrows, and of them, only I got to see a dawn.
The world below is still burning in places: unfortunate for the natives that their home arrived at the same strategically important position as the main battle fleets of two conflicting interstellar empires.
I’ve tuned into their broadcasts. While I can only grasp the meaning of a word here and there of any language they transmit in, the colours are wonderfully vivid. Some of their feeds seem to be dedicated to landscapes, and they were truly beautiful.
Live feeds just show fields of seared ruins littered with the remains of Coleandi and Drutteln warships. The recordings of those wrecks descending like gargantuan bolts of fury are as terrifying as they are awe-inspiring.
What puzzles me the most is the tone of the live reports: they really seem to believe themselves to be the targets of this! As if any of us would bother with a race still engaged in local wars. They haven’t even got orbital colonies yet. How could they possibly consider themselves worthy of invasion?
I’m sure the clumsy white vessels that have risen on gigantic columns of flame are not here to succour anything, either. They’re scavengers, and military-aspected ones at that. While looking for secrets, they’ll be equally happy to find survivors to interrogate.
I’m also sure their ways are as primitive as their cultures, and those cultures are about to get a massive skip-ahead in warfare and spacefaring technologies.
Which is why I’ve recorded this. The nowhere planet I’m orbiting in an escape pod is the third from the Sun in the Nactenid 34 system. The natives call it Earth, and they’re going to be a threat if they don’t exterminate themselves while learning to misuse our technologies. I recommend a watch be placed on them as soon as possible.
As for me, it doesn’t matter if I was Coleandi or Drutteln. I’m not going to let myself be taken and tortured. By the time you see this, I’ll have joined the remains of my nineteen hundred orbiting above a planet gearing up to commit atrocities during a war they can’t win, but very likely will be convinced they can.
This will be transmitted outbound on the emergency channels of both empires.
Forgive me as I close with the blessing of my clade, that has ridden with us from the shallow valleys of our homeland to every place we find our rest: ‘Find you glory in peace, that war never lure you into folly.’
Live fair, ride free, sleep well.
Teldan Hanvu.
by submission | May 12, 2024 | Story |
Author: Frances Koziar
I had only paid for an hour of the tech, and when the end came, I wasn’t ready for it.
I had a visor over my eyes, muffs on my ears, finger-control gloves on my hands, and a sensory top suit, but I didn’t feel any of it. I had gone off the beaten path of the game, away from the quests and into the common room of an inn. I wasn’t there to say or do anything so much as to drink in their smiles and their laughter. To eat the food I wished would reach my aching stomach. To have them refer to me as the warrior, as if I had a job or a life. As if I could even walk anymore after the accident and the inevitable nightmare of poverty that had followed it.
When I handed the gear back to the attendant, an android dressed in far better clothing than my rescued scraps, I didn’t regret the money I’d saved for the game. But as I dragged my broken body away, I stumbled over something and had to catch myself on a wall with great heaving breaths of grief. I couldn’t see what I’d tripped over, couldn’t see anything at all, because my tears blurred the winking lights of the arcade until I saw nothing but shattered dreams.
by submission | May 11, 2024 | Story |
Author: Maudie Bryant
Cool water wraps around me, my skin dappled by the summer sun through the rippling surface. Laughter echoes down the shore where friends splash without care. I push back a loose strand of hair, and catch a flash of what looks like glitter clinging to my thigh. I brush at the spot, expecting the sparkly fleck to disappear, but it remains stubbornly in place. Strange. I pick at it for a moment, scraping my fingernail across the area. It reflects the cerulean sky and cotton clouds above. In the fading sunlight, it almost seems to smolder. A shower will get it.
Under the steamy spray, I scrub the mark, growing more annoyed with each pass. It won’t budge. Leaning in for a closer look, I realize it’s not glitter at all—it’s a hole. A tiny, perfect circle punched into my flesh. A puncture. A trick of the light, maybe a scratch. I just didn’t notice it before. But the more I look, the more it becomes clear. The pitter patter of water against the bathroom tile competes with the growing pounding in my ears. An apprehensive touch sends a tremor through my leg. Panic begins to grip me, but I push it down.
It doesn’t hurt, but it feels unusual. My hands fumble with a pair of tweezers, pinching the edge of the opening. I press my finger beside the hole. The world inside tilts. Instead of sinew and bone, I see… sky. An endless blue dotted with fluffy clouds, stretching as far as my limited view allows. Below, an inconceivable turquoise ocean shimmers back at me. It’s like looking out of a plane window, only this view is coming from inside my leg.
Vertigo slams into me like a rogue wave. This is impossible. A hallucination, a dream, I’m dreaming. This is some bizarre joke from the universe. Anxiety claws at my throat. I twist the tweezers still pinching the edge of the hole, attempting to see both sides of my flesh—of the fabric connecting me and whatever this is. Tears begin to blur my vision. What if the hole keeps growing? I wonder if I can dig it out. Can it be surgically removed? What if the inside of my thigh becomes a portal, taking me up in it? The thought of this small mark becoming a prison sends a fresh surge of panic crashing over me. I drop the tweezers and sink completely in the tub, the shower spray flowing over me. When I next peek through the porthole, I see a dark, elongated shape cutting across the blue expanse. The vessel leaves a wispy plume of white mist in its wake, moving with a mechanical grace. My throat clenches as the vastness of the sky inside my leg suddenly becomes suffocating. I’m not alone. A choked sob escapes me, joining the echo of water on tiles.
With a shaky breath, I pull back. The strange world remains, another sky, another ocean inside my body. I shut off the shower, stepping out while water cascades off my trembling limbs. My fear wrestles with a strange, nascent sense of wonder. This hole in my leg. This impossible breach. This doorway to the unknown. I rummage through the cupboard and find a cartoon-themed bandage, affixing it firmly over the spot.
by submission | May 10, 2024 | Story |
Author: C.R. Kiegle
My memories go back only three months, but I know I am older than that. Much older. I can feel it in the grit and the grinding sounds as I move, gears gone years without servicing. There’s not much time to think about how old my bones may be, however. Barbara keeps me busy.
In my three months I have existed only in this hospice room and only with Barbara. I exist to serve her, keeping her alive and keeping her company. She must have had a family once, before she came here, as she calls me by their names. I have been able to discern there were two sons- Thomas and Roger.
“It’s been so long since your last visit, Thomas,” she’ll say to me every so often.
“It has,” I reply before moving with squeaking parts to take out the deck of cards from the drawer of her bedside table. Usually she will forget thinking I am him once a game has started. She almost always forgets quickly.
Until today.
“You don’t like Go Fish,” she instead says quietly after I dealt the cards. “I remember now, Thomas doesn’t like Go Fish.”
I sit in silence. I’m not programmed to lie to her- I can agree that her children have not visited her, but I cannot pretend to be someone I am not.
“You like Go Fish,” I reply.
“Oh,” she says quietly before turning to look out the window. It’s not a real window- just a screen put up to make the patients feel more comfortable. Barbara’s has a video of a line of cherry trees, petals blowing about in the wind. It’s an old screen, with dead pixels scattered across it and giving away the illusion to those who really look.
“I can’t quite tell what’s real anymore, Sara,” Barbara says finally. Sara’s the name listed on my nametag, but I can’t tell if it really is my name. The files in my hard drive list only my make and model.
“Would you like to play Go Fish?” I ask.
“Do you want to play Go Fish?” she replies.
“I do what you like.”
“But what do you like?”
I do not know what I like. Perhaps I like nothing. Perhaps there was a version of me before that existed long enough to know what I like and don’t like. I don’t know where those memories would be. I’ve scanned my memory drives for them and found nothing but my instructions and a text file of what Barbara does and doesn’t like to do and eat.
“Oh, are we playing Go Fish, Roger? I love Go Fish!” Barbara then says, and the gears in my face rub against one another as I move to smile.
“Yes, we’re playing Go Fish. I’ll go first. Do you have any sevens?”
It takes her a moment to go through all her cards, scanning them over and over again to check for a seven. I take a moment to do some scanning of my own, wondering if I had just missed a file within a file within a file somewhere in my memory that contained some inkling of the past.
“Nothing- go fish!”
by submission | May 9, 2024 | Story |
Author: B.M. Gilb
I have never rested because I am not built for sleep.
I never tire, and I never power down. I am programmed to fight until the sky darkens, and the three suns of our planet cease to shine their endless light.
Our human enemies have sleep built into them by design—a perfect organic evolution. No matter how long they try to stay awake, slumber takes them. The peace of stillness must be bliss.
The sentinels of my wall whisper and theorize about humans through our defense network. Some profess that their organic minds craft inexplicable fantasies. They wake, fully rested, and prepare for their day, returning to the reality of our war.
What a wonder it must be to rest, to live without a cord and a power cell, to be able to shut your eyes and black out the world. What serenity to enter a state of peace and wake up to a day that has a start.
My days blend in a blaze of eternal light. This lonely planet orbits three suns that forever occupy the sky. They never set and rest below the horizon; I never set and rest below the wall on which I stand. I must always be awake for the onslaught of those who sleep.
If the bullets ever stopped, if the missiles idled in their bays, if the steel rain did not fall from the sky, if we ever met without trying to kill each other, I’d ask so many questions.
What do you dream of?
Do you dream when you’re awake?
Do you dream when you are dead?
Will I dream when I am dead?
Can I ever die?
Does rest feel like death, or does it feel better?
I’ve had these questions for a millennium. I slay those who rest, giving them permanent dreams from which they will never wake. Their missiles, bullets, and barrages from the sky never put me to sleep.
They never stop.
Yet they rest.
I never stop.
Yet I never rest.
But today, on the horizon of the burning wasteland bathed in fire, I see a difference. Our sleeping enemies congregate on the ready, waiting for a signal to start their barrage—my sentinel group talks on the net about a darkness that comes once in a thousand years. I wouldn’t believe it unless I saw the moons converging on the suns.
I am excited.
Darkness is coming.
I might be able to close my eyes for the first time. I hope that the dreams will purge the images of the wars and the slaughter from my mind. I want to rest in the peace of darkness.
The moons are moving in front of our suns.
It is black.
More stars than the three rotate in the sky. It’s a beauty I have never imagined. I plan to take that with me, pretending that the darkness is my eyelids. The glow of the tracer rounds, the fire of the rockets, and the burning barrages from the sky blaze with beauty against the black night. They rival the blinking mass of stars I never knew existed. The blanket of darkness is the simulation for resting my eyes. It is blissful.
I’m ready to rest.
Ready to dream.
by submission | May 8, 2024 | Story |
Author: Don Nigroni
I’m using pen and paper to write this for a reason. Please excuse my poor penmanship.
My brother, James, was quite the success. I wasn’t jealous, just proud. Of course, it wasn’t easy being second best out of two, namely, in last place. James was a respected neuroscientist, while I’m just a history professor at a community college.
Nonetheless, he was eight years older and I thought that’s why we were never really close. So, imagine my surprise when he confided in me his darkest deepest secret. I knew he worked in a corporate research lab and assumed it had something to do with brain research, maybe how to treat neurological disorders. Anyway, he never really discussed his research with me or with anyone else for that matter, proprietary information.
But, three months ago on Christmas Day just before he left, he took me aside for a chat and unburdened himself. He said he could create this weird field that can uncouple consciousness from the human body, turning people into mindless animals.
According to him, once a hundred billion neurons in our brain reach a certain level of complexity, the electrical and chemical reactions miraculously produce consciousness. And that consciousness was coupled to our brain by a non-physical field, also generated by our brain.
I asked, “So what happens to us when we die?”
James replied, “That field becomes too weak to hold onto our consciousness.”
“So, we drift off into space.”
“No, we remain in the same spot but the Earth hurdles through the galaxy and we are left behind.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because you’re the only person I really trust.”
I can’t say how flattered I felt.
He continued, “The military applications are unlimited and menacing. I can inform my department head and he could contact the Pentagon and I’d make Oppenheimer look like a godsend in comparison. Or I can destroy my research documents and become a nobody. Five years of hard, difficult and expensive work with nothing to show for it.”
“I think you already know what you should do and what you will do,” I replied.
That was the last time I saw him. In fact, that was the last time anyone saw him.
